I'm looking for a good program (free) to use to create a sprite sheet. I want to use it with Slick2D and create some nice animations for my golden coins as they fall down the screen. I've never done sprite sheets or animation before so any tips/techniques would be appreciated

GIMP or Aseprite are good options. GIMP is a highly recommended free alternative to Photoshop.

Really, pixel art doesn't need much in the way of tools (since you should be drawing everything with a pencil tool anyway), but having a program like Photoshop or GIMP can still help you tons. Once you get really deep into complicated pixel art, it's nice to have layers, selection tools, action scripts and other advanced tools.

Strange.. My animation displays all the images in a line rather than just one at a time on the screen. I watched a video about the animation and spritesheet classes and I followed everything the guy did but I got different results. Do I have to use a method to manually separate the sprites?

Below you can see my sheet. The images are not perfect yet, I just wanted to test it out before spending ages making images.

In the video the guy used an image very similar to mine that had 4 different images on and first called the sprite sheet method in the init and then the animation method as well. When he ran the game, they were displayed one at a time on the screen. He somehow split the images up from his sprite sheet. I've linked the video at the part where he did so.

No, you need to tell SpriteSheet() how large the sprite you're animating is, so it can "cut out" the individual "slide" for you.The spritesheet is like a slideshow, the image contains multiple slides (which are scrolled through), but it can't figure out by itself how large a slide is.

Thanks guys ^_^ I got it working. Sorry for the noob questions, I only started learning game programming this week but I've learned alot.. and now about animation and sprite sheets . I have one final question.

My coins sprite sheet means that my coins rotate as they fall, how would I go about a walking animation such as key presses and jumping etc?

You would go about it the same way. Create a spritesheet or expand the current sheet to have a different animation for each type. Then use states to choose which animation to use while certain actions are done.

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